Sunpoker.com is preparing a lawsuit against another online casino for stealing advertising space it won on an ebay auction. The unusual thing about this space is it is on a pregnant woman’s belly.

The online poker company claims it placed $8,900- the highest bid- for the controversial space on Thursday evening February 10, 2005 at 4:05 PM EST. Elise Harp from Atlanta Georgia then phoned the company and said, 'You have no idea how happy I am right now about the auction. This money is going to help out SO much, plus it's going to be a lot of fun advertising for you.'

According to Sunpoker, the marketing director started making plans to put the advert on Ms Harp’s belly. He said, 'I immediately called the artist from North Georgia Airbrush and set up the meeting with himself and Ms. Harp the following morning. Then I had our promotions department FedEx Ms. Harp twenty maternity shirts with the company logo on them, just in case it was cold at night, and lastly, I had arranged several press passes to the Daytona 500 on February 20th, where we planned on getting her to show off her belly.'

However, soon after this Sunpoker received an email entitled “Auction Situation” from Ms Harp claiming she wanted to cancel the auction because she had received a better offer from another company.

SunPoker.com claims Ms. Harp is bound by the agreement she had with eBay to conduct a fair auction and sell the product or service to the highest bidder, which she has failed to do. Had she decided after the fact not to sell the item or service to anyone, there would be no problem, because she has every right to change her mind, but to undermine the auction process and privately solicit an under bidder after the auction has ended is a breach of the agreement.

An additional suit is being planned against the competitor for plagiarism among other reasons. 'They copied word for word, a paragraph from our press release on the matter, and then stole our idea of bringing Ms. Harp to the Daytona 500,' Mann contends, 'If you're going steal our ideas, at least change the words around a bit.'

In the last six months ebay has become the focus of attention for marketing gurus at certain online gambling companies. GoldenPalace has paid out for some controversial items to grab the headlines, including a decade-old cheese sandwich with a fleeting resemblance to the Virgin Mary and a supposedly haunted walking stick.